Anxiety can be created by the body, mouse heart study suggests
nature.com
nature.com
I had moderately serious heart problem (atrial murmur, sort of the less-serious cousin of afib/atrial fibrilation) and it was extremely clear to me that whatever was happening in my chest was also directly spiking my feelings of anxiety.
To be clear, I mean a direct heart->anxiety link, as opposed to "I'm thinking about my heart problem and therefore my anxiety is spiking" indirect link. On an experiential level it was very, very distinct from, say, being stressed out because your toenail hurts.
I realize that I'm a sample of one, and self-diagnosing phenomena like that is not particularly reliable. However, it was so crystal clear to me that I would consider it something close to truth and would place the burden of proof on anybody looking to claim otherwise.
There would certainly seem to be a significant biological advantage there, to having certain biological situations (pain, etc) cause a spike in corisol etc directly, as opposed to relying on the slower and less reliable processing our wonderful brains can provide. Especially in species with far simpler brains than humans.
Does your current valve situation cause an elevated heart rate, presumably because your heart is is compensating for not pumping as efficiently as it should?
I had a different issue and I'm extremely unqualified to have an opinion here, but based on my personal experience I'd be willing to put down a pretty decent sum of money on a bet that lowering your heart rate will reduce your anxiety directly.
(And then you'll of course have lower stress in general I should think, because you won't be worrying about the upcoming valve replacement and all the uncertainly surrounding a major operation. But that part is pretty clear, I would think)
Good luck!
My understanding is that the heart compensates for the dysfunctional valve by attempting to pump a greater volume with each stroke.
Just getting tests every 6 months and waiting for the time to come. I have fine resting heart rate around 70bpm and 130 blood pressure avg. (These numbers went down after college)
stomach distress was triggering attacks. The Vagus nerve is
a puppet master and it can fuck with your sense of well-being
on a good day
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what caused it. I certainly was not particularly mentally stressed out that day. I'm not even really anxious in general compared to others. I am middle aged and have had a lot of acutely stressful days without panic attacks, and also just... a lot of days in general... so I can't imagine why an unstressful day lead to one.
It certainly didn't feel like it originated within my brain. It felt like my body was triggering it. It felt like an incident in the past when I was diagnosed with acute pericarditis and nearly died. However, when I went to the ER following the panic attack, they found nothing physically wrong on the EKG.
Of course, we are not necessarily biologically or cognitively well-equipped to self-diagnose "why" our brains are feeling a particular thing. But nonetheless whether it was my vagus nerve or something else, it certainly felt like it originated outside of my mind.
They can both feel like tightness in the chest and from what I was told, the brain isn't good at separating signals. So your body feeling anxious leads to your brain feeling anxious. It's a wonderful cycle. Throw in asthma for more fun. Now you have three possible problems that can all trigger each other! Get sick and feel short of breath? Now you have four! Aren't bodies fun? :D
No bipolar here but for years I struggled with asthma for years. It is quite the addition to the whole anxiety mix. It definitely took me quite a while to figure out I was dealing with a heart issue, because the symptoms were really similar to asthma.
I know you mean well, but I don't like being thought of as a superhero. It defines me by my limitations and hold me up as something exceptional. I actually find this to be quite harmful. :(
Consider this: I only need to be exceptional because society would not allow me to be successful otherwise. There are many others with my disability who aren't.
It borders on the edge of inspiration porn[1].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewpulrang/2019/11/29/how-to...
I hope my comment isn't too harsh. It's been a long day. :)
Prior to properly getting diagnosed I went through a bunch of tests and episodes because the sensations manifested as heart-attack-like symptoms. I can tell you the anxiety produced was, ... palpable.
also helped me to eat more gelatine (one teaspoon in the morning), seemingly the body can work these amino acids very fast and it sounds crazy but I felt the effects within a day. The main problem didn't go away for a long time, but a lot of small side issues went away.
[0]: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/... [1]: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders
I went to the doc, and he recognized the symptoms as a panic attack. I told the doc “no, you’re not listening. I have zero anxiety in my life right now.” Several dozen attacks later and a doctor that didn’t try to gaslight me into having an anxiety disorder, we found the heart problem.
Fun times.
It's no good just to do meditation and calm your mind if your body and nervous system is still holding on to so much stress.
The body remembers many things and "embodies" many emotions. You can notice this if you do part-by-part relaxation. Lie down in corpse pose and close your eyes, and relax each part of your body by turn. From right toes, through feet, ankles, calves, shins, knees, thighs, hips. Then the left leg. Then right fingertips and the rest of the right arm. Then left arm. Then abdomen. Then chest. Then spine. Then head.
The more granular you go with relaxing each part of the anatomy, the more intense (and longer in duration) it is. [E.g. in feet you can do: relax each toe, toe nail, first joint of the big toe, ball of the big toe, next toe. Then soul of the foot. Then inner side of the foot. Then outer side. Then top of the foot. Then inside the foot. Bones and joints in the foot. Muslces and tendons in the foot. Nerves of the foot. Skin of the foot.] Relax each part. Let of any tension in each part. And move on.
Anyway, you can just do a level of anatomical granularity you are comfortable with. But what you will probably notice is that as you go over your body doing this, your mind will wander, and stuff you hadn't thought about the entire day (or longer) will come up. Some annoying or painful or traumatic moment or whatever will arise, as you hit on some particular body part. And it will interrupt your relaxation. So you just stay with it, and then keep going, relaxing your body. Skeptical folks will probably doubt that there's a correlation between a body part and a "stored" emotion or experience, but in that case I encourage you to try it. Relaxing the body in this way really relieves and releases many things stored in it, that without bringing awareness to them in this way, you would not have realized.
Wouldn't you want to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system? Not calm it?
You need to fully stimulate it for it to relax afterwards. That can also be accomplished with breathing exercises, ice baths, etc.
Or yoga...That stretching! And posture.
“Relaxing” the parasympathetic system would therefore free the sympathetic nervous system to activate more strongly, thereby making you more anxious.
It’s distracting and disorienting when people appropriate medical and scientific language to explain their internal experience of the world. One is measured through experiment, the other through direct perception.
Tamps down on? That's not true. Either one or the other is active? They're both continuously active.
Relaxing would free it? No, that's not true. When you relax a nervous system it becomes more effectively active, because the signals are more coherent. Yeah, more anxious? No.
Hahaha! Distracting and disorienting? Hahah! Medical and scientific? You mean like you're doing? You're the one misappropriating meanings here.
Internal experience of the world? Or their internal experience of a textbook, that you've misinterpreted anyway? Well look, internal experience is what you have to rely on. Otherwise you end up with these sort of uh, twisted textbook definitions where you don't have the experience.
You need to have the experience first. Only then will you know the meaning of those words. That’s why yoga is so important: it gives you more experience—of who you are, of your body, of how it works.
Perception and experiment? Very clever, haha :) Well look, I see you're trying to make a point. I see you're trying to contribute. But the problem is here, you just don't know. You don't have the experience to know what these words really mean in this context. And so, you know, you're not useful here. I'm sorry. Your contribution is not useful anyway.
Maybe you have a bad experience with yoga or a teacher or something. In the past, I don't know. It's possible. A girlfriend left for someone she met in the class or you felt like the class humiliated you. Look, it can happen. You can have bad teachers or bad classes. I feel sorry for you if that's the case. But you just don't know in this context. So, I encourage you to give it another shot. Give yoga another shot and give it a try. I got super lucky. I had a great teacher. So, I encourage you to try to find a really great teacher. Best of luck to you.
We calm it and maybe it isn't active. We stimulate it and then it's relaxing us. I see what you're saying.
Is there another side to it? Isn't calm and soothed a form of stimulation? An active, easy coherence?
Maybe we don't want to be over-stimulated. Stimulated in the right way creates coherence, in the wrong way, chaos. We can be calm--and active. Or we can be stimulated--and uneasy.
You don't have to worry that it won't be stimulated in the right way when it's calmed and soothed: it will be. And that's what you want.
So, I don't think you can go wrong with a calm and soothed parasympathetic nervous system. That's the way to go. For me, soothes and calms is coherence. And that's good for your body, and good for you, it's what you'll feel when you do yoga.
Someone smarter than me please let me know :D
But if you're doing yoga the benefits extend in time far beyond the session. So say you're doing hatha yoga 3 times a week. You're going to be relaxed and calm; your nervous system is going to be more resilient to stress; You're going to be more focused; you're going to sleep better and need less sleep -- for that whole week. So the "half-life" is a lot longer compared to nicotine.
Nicotine is only toxic in high doses
But also...acutely toxic at high doses. It's still a toxin at low doses. And I wouldn't say how it's giving you the relaxation it is healthy for you at low doses. But yoga is.
I just want to point out that for nearly all of its history yoga is primarily about meditation, with the asanas being preliminary, quickly covered material in most classic texts.
The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali are a good reference for anyone curious (though the sections on the siddhis is... interesting).
If the small intestine can trigger a panic attack, it's not that surprising that other organs can also create anxiety.
Huh, I'd have said this idea was already well-established. I'm curious how this finding is different than the existing evidence that bodily sensations can influence emotions. I mean, I can't be the only one who feels anxious when I've had too many cups of coffee or ate something funny
Eventually got diagnosed with a congenital heart disease. Turns out, when your heart is behaving in a way that mirrors symptoms of anxiety, your brain decides you’re anxious. Your brain just picks something to be anxious about, because there’s no mental reason for anxiety.
Within a week of being on the heart meds my anxiety mostly disappeared. Still get anxious from time to time, but over actual things and it’s manageable. But, was really a life changer
There's no reason for it, but for whatever reason it triggers anxiety.
I can't explain beyond that, and I'm very familiar with my own conscious anxieties and triggers outside this.
It just is that.
The association between mitral valve prolapse and anxiety is well-known. However this physical difference is completely ignored when it's mild. In the general population, mild prolapse is seen as a common thing.
However there are also diseases caused by genetic mutations which cause both mitral valve changes and also a whole set of body problems including chronic pain, elasticity, vascular problems etc. The underlying causes are so under-researched that an easily fixable problem tied to a gene becomes a progressive disease over a lifetime which is damn hard to diagnose. You suddenly see that too few resources are dedicated to actually understand and solve medical problems instead of treating symptoms when they get severe.
Plus... coffee is a pretty good way to kick off anxiety and we know it for at least a century I guess.
The point of medical research - especially the kind that seems obvious - is not just to discover new things, but to confirm what we think is obvious really, indeed, is obvious, and this isn't always the conclusion of such research.
Maybe just messing with the heart causes anxiety lol. Brain there like "wait, I didn't tell you to do that.. red alert!"
E.g. I have hyperhydrosis (excessive sweating). When my hands start sweating (for no good reason), I get anxious especially when around people expecting a handshake, which makes me more anxious which makes the hand sweating worse.
(If anyone suffers from the same re: sweating, ask you doctor about glycopyrrolate - it’s one of those drugs that is completely life changing for anyone with excessive sweating and with minimal/tolerable side effects)
Propranolol is also a godsend for anxiety (also with minimal side effects, unlike benzos , etc)
External things don't cause anxiety. Anxiety often occurs as a reaction to external things. Of course anxiety might be caused by a faster heartbeat; one of the symptoms of anxiety is a faster heartbeat. You can also cause it with injections of adrenaline, or amphetamines. Lack of oxygen works, too.
Maybe this seems profound because the mice can't explain their feelings?
I suppose, but how does the information about danger get from the eyes to the heart to the brain faster than from the eyes to the brain?
I was always under the impression that it is a two way street. Just that modern science doesn’t want to accept that emotions cause bodily problems and vice versa. If anxiety can be created, perhaps anger can too.
Here’s an old study about escaping stressors leading to tumor rejection in mice:
If anxiety is not created by the body where does it originate from? extra terrestrial beings? the immortal soul? purely in our surrounding environment?
All of these (except the third option) require pretty impressive assumptions to even be a workable hypothesis.
[0]: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/11/what-is-an-emotion...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987984/
It's almost as if research is done on mice on purpose. Of course you're going to see new discoveries, positive or negative, come out of studies involving the most widely used test subject on the planet.
Does the generic 'yah but it sez in mouse' really add anything to the conversation?
I'd love to hear from an expert on the subject, thats why I'm on HN.
Of course it's a free community, people are welcome to post and upvote whatever they like, still we do have cultural norms here around high signal/noise and I understand the sentiment.
Does a comment complaining about the high signal/noise ratio do anything but discourage discussion?